Black Cat Weekly #71

Chapter 7-1

The Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

The Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

personally selected by one of the most acclaimed

personally selected by one of the most acclaimedshort stories authors and editors in the mystery

short stories authors and editors in the mysteryfield, Barb Goffman, for Black Cat Weekly.

field, Barb Goffman, for .

byA billion cubic feet of snow fell on Boston this winter, enough to fill a football stadium about a hundred times. Lucky for us, the Patriots played their big game in Arizona—the day of the first storm of three that week. The last stormy week that Billy Myers ever saw.

I met Billy last summer, when he first moved into the neighborhood. Our part of Jamaica Plain is real old school. The gentrification wave seems to have crested about a block from our street. Over there, they worry if there’s gluten in their food, whether it comes from some organic form. Over here, we’re happy to eat. And hey, you gotta die of something, right? You might as well enjoy it while you can.

Billy Myers was one of those guys. He showed up just before the Fourth of July, fresh-faced and ready for his residency at Mass General. JP is a popular place for that crowd—an easy ride on the T to a lot of different hospitals, plus it’s just bohemian enough to give them a sense of roughing it. There are projects and halfway houses, thrift stores and no-name dive bars to spend an hour or two in and then brag about facing some raggedy townie like me. Then there are all the expensive art galleries and foreign-food restaurants to escape to, where they can drink a craft beer and tell stories about the horrible conditions we live in like we’re jungle savages. I mean, we have four Indian restaurants alone.

Anyhow, Billy wasn’t the sharpest scalpel on the tray. He thought the hospital would take care of all the housing arrangements for him, and by the time light dawned that he had to get off his duff and do it himself, the chichi condos in the nicer neighborhoods were probably swallowed up, leaving him to take a step down and cross the line into the real Jamaica Plain.

It was one of the first nasty days in early summer, hot and muggy and sticky. I didn’t have to be at work until the second shift, and was having a beer on the stoop when a rented truck pulled up next door to the Gallaghers’ old house. Jimmy was the last of the Gallaghers, but he’d moved out to Dedham, where his mother-in-law died and left him and his wife a better house. I’d known Jimmy was going to rent it out, but I never thought it would be to some yuppie.

At first, the guy I came to know as Billy seemed worried about getting out of the truck.

He must have rented the place over the phone or something, because as he scanned the lay of the land, his eyes were the size of dinner plates. They stopped for a beat on me, as if he’d never seen a guy drinking a beer before eleven in the morning. Finally, his friend gave him a shove, and the two of them climbed out. They looked like they thought we had snipers on our roofs or something. The friend went to the back of the truck, while Billy climbed the porch stairs.

He gave me a quick wave, something halfway between “Hello” and “Please don’t kill me, I swear I have a key.” Then he was inside a good ten minutes. I imagined him walking through the place, checking out the old wallpaper, the seventies-era appliances Jimmy had left behind, the pink tiles and tub in the bathroom. When he finally came out, he was shaking his head but looked determined to make the best of it.

I cracked open another beer and watched them unload the truck. He didn’t have much, just some basic furniture—a futon that they wrestled through the door, boxes of books, a big flat-screen TV. Billy glanced at me as they carried in the TV, like I was going to steal it or something. The whole thing lasted a couple of hours, then they left.

I didn’t see much of Billy for a few days, but I did see the locksmith come and install a dead bolt. The Gallaghers never even locked the door when were growing up. Billy also put a bright new label on the mailbox for his mailman. Houses around here don’t have driveways, so Billy had to keep his car, an almost-new Subaru, on the street like the rest of us. At night, the car alarm’s red light blinked every few seconds, reflecting off the bar that locked the steering wheel for good measure.

The next time I saw Billy was on July Fourth. I’d been up to New Hampshire and bought a boatload of fireworks. Roman candles, bottle rockets, aerial spinners. I’d been doing it for years. Everyone in the neighborhood came out to watch. I started with some loud firecrackers, just to let folks know the show was about to start. Then I sent up some Roman candles. Fwoomp, fwoomp, fwoomp. The whole street lit up green and red. Billy scrambled through his door like they were real mortar shells coming to get him.

“Hey, I don’t mean to be a killjoy,” he called out from the safety of the porch, “but fireworks are illegal in this state. Besides, you could hit my car.”

He’d had to yell a bit. In response, I lit off a bottle rocket. It zipped up and popped, casting a bright white light over everything.

“I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot,” he continued, a little less confidently. “Could you at least not do that so close to the houses? You could set something on fire.”

By now, a small crowd had come out to watch the fireworks. At some point Billy disappeared, not that I was paying attention to him. About half an hour later, just as I was finishing the show, a cruiser came down our street, blue lights flashing but no siren.

“Everything okay?” I asked as the car stopped.

The cop looked around, saw the smoke hanging in the air but nothing else. “Got a call,” he said without much conviction. “Seen any fireworks going off around here?”

“Always something going up, from one yard or another,” I said. “Couldn’t tell exactly where from.”

The cop nodded, wished me a happy Fourth, and rode on. Before he turned the corner, I set off my last bottle rocket, blue to match the cruiser, and he waved. I glanced up at Billy’s window, just in time to see the curtain twitch shut.

After that, Billy didn’t show himself much. About a week later, I was mowing my lawn before work. Must’ve been around nine, when most of the neighbors had already left for the day.

But Dr. Resident At A Big Hospital worked nights. Not that I knew that—until he stumbled out the back door and leaned on the fence between our houses. I remember when Jimmy Gallagher’s grandfather put that fence in. I must’ve been five or six. We helped him by plopping wet cement in the post holes.

Billy’s hair was standing up, and he needed a shave. He wore boxer shorts and a T-shirt that advertised some art gallery in Philadelphia.

“Hey,” he said when I turned the mower around and was coming back towards him. I cut the motor. “I haven’t had a chance to meet you. My name’s Billy Myers.” I was about to tell him my name, be friendly, but he barreled right on. “I hate to complain, but do you have to mow so early? I just went to bed.”

“I just got up. Need to be at work soon. Nice to meet you.” I pulled on the starter, and the mower came back to life. He watched me a minute, then moved as I made my turn at the fence.

When I turned again, he was gone.

This is an old neighborhood, my little corner of JP. Used to be the kinda place outsiders never passed through, except to take the old el, which ended here at the huge concrete Forest Hills station. They took the elevated tracks down in the eighties, and moved the trains to a subway trench that cut through the neighborhood. It opened up Washington Street and let the sun shine on some corners that never had seen the light. But the good old bars that had been near the el shut down before I could legally drink, and suddenly people with money were buying up properties in the area for a song. That’s what they call “gentrification.”

Some of the change was good, I’m not gonna lie. There used to be a lot of trash hanging around under those elevated tracks, and a lot of rotted old tenements came down too. They replaced the old station with a clean new subway platform. Suburban folks crowded the muggers off the trains.

When the developers saw that they could buy up whole blocks and clean them up for profit, they didn’t pay attention to those of us who had been here all along.

Some of our neighbors took the payoff and moved to Dedham or even Canton. The ones who stayed had to put up with classy old homes suddenly painted rainbow colors, like dollhouses. Mothers pushed strollers around that cost more than my car, as if a fold-up carriage from Bradlees wasn’t good enough. The closed-down bars were turned into “funky” used-clothing stores, where people paid too much money for pants that were ripped and stained, stuff my mother would’ve beat me for wearing in public.

Billy was the latest of that crowd. A few blocks over, near where I played basketball with the old g**g, he could’ve bought a condo and flipped it a year later the way the other doctors do.

But like I said, he wasn’t on the ball, and he landed next door to me. Still, he did his best to bring us up to the standard he thought we deserved.

Not long after he settled in, he must’ve gotten Jimmy’s permission to paint the porch. I saw him one afternoon scraping away the old white chips, replacing it with yellow and blue and red. I’ll admit that in all my life I’d never noticed the porch had all those designs carved in the woodwork, and Billy spent hours making every little detail a different color. It looked like a twelve-year-old girl who just discovered makeup and slathered it all over her face.

I didn’t care much. It was his house, even if it looked like a cathouse. But then one day, towards the end of the summer, when I was sitting in the yard drinking a six, he leaned on the porch rail and said, “Hey, how are ya?” He was still wearing his hospital clothes and clogs. It’s hard to talk like a blue-collar guy when you’re wearing blue pajamas.

“What’s going on?” I said, trying to be friendly, trying to forget that last week he’d left me a note saying that I shouldn’t be leaving my garbage out more than eighteen hours before trash day.

“I was wondering what you thought of the paint job on the trim,” he said. After he’d finished the porch, he’d done the windows too.

I shrugged. “Hadn’t noticed. Looks okay, I guess.”